CCS Bard | Exhibitions and Events

Estranged Objects

Curator: Paula A. Bigboy

April 9 – May 8, 2005
Yellow Bird Gallery, 19 Front Street, Newburgh, N.Y.

Gallery hours: Wednesday–Saturday, 11:00 a.m. – 7:00 p.m.; Sunday 12:00–5:00 p.m.
Opening reception: Saturday, April 9, 1:00–4:00 p.m.

This exhibition is a master's thesis exhibition curated by Paula Bigboy and organized by the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College in conjunction with its graduate program in curatorial studies and contemporary art.

We nurture an affectionate relationship to the past. Remembering events as we want to and not necessarily as they happened, a distortion of history ensues; we recall beginnings and endings and some moments that changed us, but tend to forget or disassociate from the things that hurt us, the things we are not proud of, the things that do not fit into the greater story of our lives. This is the premise of Estranged Objects: that history is not an unbiased continuum, but rather a production of the past that occurs and recurs from different points in the present. In this production, the preservation and display of the objects known as the fossil and the artifact play a vital visual role in authenticating and representing the experience of a former time that is otherwise unknowable.

Dario Robleto
I Won't Let You Say Goodbye This Time
2001-2003
Suite of seven pigmented inkjet prints, Ed 5/7
Re-activated NASA "Space Seeds" (tomato seeds flown in space and launched on a probe from the space shuttle Challenger, 1984, retrieved on the Columbia, 1990), cotton, dirt, custom-made porcelain cups, dust made from fragments of shuttle ceramic heat shields, letraset
10 1/2 x 7 1/2 in. each
Courtesy of Inman Gallery, Houston

The objects in the exhibition are estranged in the sense that they adopt the form of the fossil and the artifact to puncture history rather than to perpetuate or reinforce it. I Won’t Let You Say Goodbye This Time is a suite of seven digital photographs in which Dario Robleto documents his attempt to regrow tomato seeds that were said to be aboard the LDEF (Long Duration Exposure Facility) probe that went up to space in 1984 with the Challenger shuttle. Through complex layering and narrative, the seeds become a metaphorical vehicle for dealing with death and the tragedy of the Challenger’s explosion. Robleto’s sentimental but sincere gesture of planting one seed for each of the seven Challenger crewmembers that died in the explosion is not an act of memorialization, however. The presentation of the gesture through the form of the photograph eternally captures the plants in their moment of bloom and seduces us into believing in an alternate, imaginary ending in which the crewmembers lived to cultivate the seeds. I Won’t Let You Say Goodbye This Time thus becomes a heroic attempt to restore life where death has occurred. It suggests that art has the potential to change history, and the power to alter our relationships to the past even if it fails.

Dario Robleto
Nowadays I Only Look Up to Pray
2001-2002
Custom made kaleidoscope, wood, brass, mirrors, hand-ground trinitite (glass produced during the first atomic test explosion, circa 1945 from Trinity test site, when heat from blast melted surrounding sand), antique wood and brass tripod.
28 x 28 x 55 in.

The Abstractness Of A Blown Off Limb
2002
Handmade clay and lead marbles used by soldiers from the Civil War, American-Indian Wars and Mexican-American War, human and dinosaur dust from femur bones
14 in. diameter
Collection of Christopher Vroom and Illya Szilak, New York

Robleto’s sculptural diptych Nowadays I Only Look Up To Pray and The Abstractness of a Blown Off Limb punctures history from a futuristic point in which the artist asks us to reflect on what will one day be the past—the present. Nowadays is a custom-made kaleidoscope crafted out of wood, brass, mirrors, and hand-ground trinitite (glass produced during the first nuclear test explosion when heat from the blast melted surrounding sand. The Abstractness of a Blown Off Limb is a pile of ground human and dinosaur bone dust 14 inches in diameter that provides a playing field for a game of marbles. The marbles are handmade clay and lead marbles of different colors that were used by soldiers from the Civil War, American-Indian Wars and Mexican-American War. The mixture of the bone dust of the dinosaur—a species that was supposedly made extinct by a natural cause (a meteorite) with the bone dust of a human in the midst of references to war and nuclear explosion suggests that we exercise some level of control over our own fate and what will become history. The incorporation of trinitite in the kaleidoscope metaphorically implies that the lens through which we view the world might be as dangerous to our livelihood as weapons of mass destruction.

Allan McCollum
Natural Copies from the Coal Mines of Central Utah 1994
Enamel paint on cast polymer-enhanced Hydrocal
Cast replicas of a natural dinosaur track cast found in the Beaver Creek Coal Mine #2, Utah, produced in collaboration with the College of Eastern Utah Prehistoric Museum, Price, Carbon County, Utah
30 x 30 x 30 in. each
Installation: Friedrich Petzel Gallery, New York City, 1998.

The material specificity of the works in Estranged Objects, coupled with the artists’ critical manipulations of those materials estranges these objects in another way—it estranges them from a structure of object classification in which art and artifact exist as mutually opposed categories representing nature and culture. Dario Robleto fuses the remnants of material culture into faux artifacts that invoke a fictional narrative. Allan McCollum, on the other hand, artfully reproduces fossils and artifacts to give them value as art objects. Natural Copies from the Coal Mines of Central Utah presents variously colored recastings of natural casts of dinosaur tracks that were found in the coal mines of Central Utah in the 1920s. After discovering a collection of over forty of these fossils on display at the College of Eastern Utah Prehistoric Museum in Price, Carbon County, Utah, McCollum obtained rubber molds made from the original fossils to produce the first Natural Copies in 1995. They have been made in 44 different shapes and sizes and eight colors, and are displayed on individual bases. Exhibited along with the track casts are Reprints—21 different colored copies of articles dealing with the topic of dinosaur tracks from a variety of perspectives and disciplines. McCollum’s engagement with the logic of mass production in his work provides a visual representation of what it means to produce and reproduce history. Yet through changes in the color, size, and shape of the Natural Copies, he forces us to realize that even though the process of assigning meaning and value to objects is of a similar nature, the way in which we see these objects as authentic of a history is culturally specific and highly artistic.

Dario Robleto was born in 1972 in San Antonio, Texas. He received his B.F.A. from the University of Texas at San Antonio. Solo exhibitions include The Whitney Museum of American Art at Altria, New York, NY; The Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, CA; Galerie Praz-Delavallade, Paris; Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, TX; Inman Gallery, Houston, TX; and Artpace, San Antonio, TX. He has also participated in several group exhibitions in venues such as The Renaissance Society, Chicago, IL; The New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; Gasworks, London; and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, CA. The artist lives and works in San Antonio, Texas.

Allan McCollum was born in 1944 in Los Angeles, California. His career has spanned over thirty years and is marked by over 100 solo exhibitions including retrospectives at The Musée d'Art Moderne, Villeneuve d'Ascq, Lille, France; the Sprengel Museum, Hannover, Germany; the Serpentine Gallery, London; the Rooseum Center for Contemporary Art, Malmo, Sweden; and IVAM Centre del Carme, Valencia, Spain. His work has also been featured in group exhibitions at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; the Centre national d’art et de culture Georges Pompidou, Paris, France; the Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; and The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY. The artist lives and works in New York.

Special thanks to: Norton Batkin, Marcia Acita, Colleen Egan, Michael, Peter, Chris, Risa Puleo, Yasmeen Siddiqui, Friedrich Petzel Gallery, Inman Gallery, Allan, and Dario.

Estranged Objectsis one of four exhibitions on display from April 9 to May 8, 2005. Also on display are: a forest and a tree; Fragments of Time; and Looking Both Ways: Three Artists

For travel directions and other information about Yellow Bird Gallery, see www.yellowbirdgallery.com or call 845-561-7204 (Yellow Bird Gallery) or 845-758-7598 (Center for Curatorial Studies).

Exhibition Checklist

Allan McCollum
Natural Copies from the Coal Mines of Central Utah
1994-95
Enamel paint on cast polymer-enhanced Hydrocal
Cast replicas of a natural dinosaur track cast found in the Beaver Creek Coal Mine #2, Utah, produced in collaboration with the College of Eastern Utah Prehistoric Museum, Price, Carbon County, Utah
30 x 30 x 30 in. each
Courtesy of the artist and Friedrich Petzel, New York

Dario Robleto
Nowadays I Only Look Up To Pray
2001-2002
Custom-made kaleidoscope, wood, brass, mirrors, hand-ground trinitite (glass produced during the first atomic test explosion, circa 1945 from Trinity test site, when heat from blast melted surrounding sand), antique wood and brass tripod
28 x 28 x 55 in.

Dario Robleto
I Won’t Let You Say Goodbye This Time
2001-2003
Suite of seven archival digital photographs, ed. 5/7
Re-activated NASA “Space Seeds” (tomato seeds flown in space and launched on a probe from the space shuttle Challenger, 1984, retrieved on the Columbia, 1990), cotton, dirt, custom-made porcelain cups, dust made from fragments of shuttle ceramic heat shields, letraset
10 1/2 x 7 1/2 in. each
Courtesy of Inman Gallery, Houston

Estranged Objects

Exhibition Checklist

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